The piece makes a strong case that we’ve drifted from being citizens to being consumers, shaped more by engineered desire than by reflection. The history matters. It shows this did not happen overnight. Psychology, advertising, and politics slowly merged and learned how to pull emotional levers.
What I would add is this: awareness alone is not enough. Knowing we are being influenced does not automatically restore independent thought. We also have built in blind spots like confirmation bias. We naturally look for evidence that supports what we already believe. That makes us easy to steer.
If we want to trust our own minds again, we have to train them. That means slowing down, seeking out views we disagree with, and testing our assumptions against reality. The real work is not just resisting manipulation. It is building habits of clear thinking. A society that can do that is much harder to control.
Thank you Nikolas, you are right to insist that awareness, by itself, is a thin defense.
One of the uncomfortable lessons of the story I tried to tell is precisely that the architects of mass persuasion understood our blind spots better than we do. Bernays did not need people to be ignorant. He needed them to be human. If we are wired for confirmation bias, for belonging, for narrative coherence, then simply exposing the mechanism does not neutralize it. It only gives us a vocabulary for what continues to happen.
I think you are also right that the task is constructive, not merely oppositional. It is not enough to say “do not manipulate me.” One must cultivate the habits that make manipulation less effective. Slowing down. Reading across disagreement. Testing intuitions against evidence rather than applause. These are not dramatic gestures. They are disciplines.
In a sense, this returns us to the fork in the road between Bernays and Roosevelt. One path assumes the public is too impulsive to trust and must therefore be managed. The other assumes that citizens can become more capable if they are treated as such. But that second path is not automatic. It requires effort, education, and practice. It requires what you call training the mind.
The deeper irony is that the very skills that make a society harder to control are the least commercially profitable. Reflection does not scale as easily as desire. Independent thought does not generate quarterly returns. Yet without those habits, democracy becomes theatre.
So I would extend your point this way: the defense against engineered desire is not merely skepticism. It is character. It is the slow cultivation of intellectual virtues that resist the seductions of immediacy. A population that practices that kind of thinking cannot be perfectly insulated from influence, but it can be far less predictable. And unpredictability, in the face of those who would engineer consent, is a form of freedom.
Strong historical arc here. Bernays’ pivot from duty to desire still echoes louder than most people realize. What strikes me now, though, is less the origin of the engineering and more the posture it produces.
At some point the question shifts from “How were we shaped?” to “What do we do with that knowledge?”
The machinery is real. Desire has been cultivated, redirected, monetized. But explanation alone doesn’t restore agency. It can even harden fatalism if we aren’t careful.
The more practical counterweight may not be intellectual resistance but behavioral interruption — reclaiming attention, altering rhythm, refusing reflex. The unconscious can be mined, but it can also be disciplined through posture and timing.
If democracy drifted from duty toward appetite, perhaps the quiet correction begins not in exposing the engineers, but in strengthening the citizen again — one deliberate act at a time.
Appreciate the reminder of the architecture. The next frontier may be the habits that undo it.
Thank you. You are right to move the question forward.
History can clarify origins, but it does not, by itself, repair posture. There is always a risk that explanation becomes a kind of intellectual spectator sport. We diagnose the machinery, admire its precision, and then return to scrolling. That is not agency; it is commentary.
Your phrase “behavioral interruption” is important. The engineering of consent works at the level of rhythm. It thrives on immediacy, on reflex, on the shortening of attention cycles. If that is true, then the counterweight may not begin with a counter-argument but with a counter-tempo. Delayed reaction. Deliberate pause. A refusal to let appetite set the cadence.
In that sense, the restoration of the citizen is less theatrical than we might wish. It happens in small, almost invisible acts: reading something that challenges us rather than confirms us; resisting the urge to perform opinion before forming it; choosing participation over consumption in at least one sphere of life. These are not grand rebellions. They are recalibrations.
So true, Michael, fatalism is a danger. If the unconscious can be shaped, monetized, and mobilized, it is tempting to conclude that we are permanently programmable. But the very fact that posture can change, that rhythm can be altered, suggests otherwise. Discipline is not the denial of desire; it is its governance.
And as Cathie says, the quiet correction you describe is the real frontier. Not a dramatic overthrow of the engineers, but the slow strengthening of habits that make engineering less decisive. If the twentieth century perfected the art of cultivating appetite, the twenty-first may depend on recovering deliberation.
The machinery works on speed. Reflex. Appetite. Shortened cycles.
Which means the interruption has to be behavioral, not just intellectual.
Slowing reaction. Finishing thought before broadcasting it. Choosing to read before responding. Small disciplines that don’t look dramatic but change cadence over time.
Engineering thrives on predictability. Agency reappears the moment rhythm is no longer automatic.
The correction won’t be loud. It will be steady.
And steady, practiced long enough, reshapes posture.
"Ultimately it means actively working to create the person you want to be..." This implies the first step is answering the question "Who do I want to be?" followed by "why?". It's seemingly simple and straightforward, but in reality it isn't.
I concur, Winston, it is seemingly straightforward but in reality it isn't.
I'd like to add that, as a mentor, I've come to reframe this question in a different way, as the 'self-help' movement is a billion dollar industry promoting this, "Who do I want to be" question into self absorption, ego driven answers, that do not have the desired outcome you'd and I'd hoped for from what is meant as a self-reflection question on life to this moment in their lives.
Here is what i ask my mentees: What overarching outcome is desirable, and why, not only for self but for society. This question, I've found, focuses their mind in a significant arc of thoughtful investigation.
Winston, I think you have put your finger on a key point. The moment you actually try to answer “Who do I want to be?” the ground shifts. Is that answer emerging from reflection, or from a catalogue of prepackaged identities handed to me by culture, advertising, tribe?
That is precisely where my essay’s history becomes relevant. If desire has been cultivated for a century, then even our self-image may not be entirely our own. The question is simple in grammar and complex in origin.
Wendy, your reframing is deeply compelling. The self-help industry has indeed taken that question and turned it inward to the point of distortion. “Who do I want to be?” too easily becomes “How do I optimize my status, comfort, visibility?” It can harden into ego maintenance.
Your alternative, “What overarching outcome is desirable, and why, not only for self but for society?”, shifts the axis perfectly. It reintroduces duty without denying individuality. It places the self back inside a larger field of consequence. That move alone disrupts the consumer logic that tells us identity is something we purchase and curate.
There is something profoundly anti-Bernays in that reframing. It resists engineered appetite and asks instead about contribution, responsibility, orientation. It treats the self not as a project of aesthetic construction, but as a participant in a shared world.
Perhaps the real answer to Winston’s question is that the “who” cannot be settled before the “why,” and the “why” cannot be answered in isolation. The person we want to become is inseparable from the kind of society we are willing to help build. And that is a much harder, and more fruitful, inquiry than the self-help aisle suggests.
Strengthening citizens doesn’t begin with slogans or counter-propaganda. It begins with small disciplines that return weight to the individual.
A few deliberate acts come to mind:
First — pause before reacting. Not silence. Not withdrawal. Just a deliberate delay between stimulus and response. That one space restores agency.
Second — read something longer than you prefer. A chapter, not a headline. Attention is a muscle. If we don’t exercise it, someone else will gladly train it for us.
Third — speak in complete thoughts. Not fragments. Not reposted lines. When you articulate your own reasoning out loud, you reclaim authorship of your mind.
Fourth — verify one thing a week yourself. Go to the primary source. Look at the document. Don’t rely on the summary. That habit alone changes posture.
Fifth — build something tangible. Fix a hinge. Plant something. Cook without a shortcut. When the hands work, the mind steadies.
None of these are dramatic. That’s the point.
Strength doesn’t return through spectacle. It returns through repetition.
Quiet correction doesn’t look like rebellion. It looks like competence.
And competence, multiplied across households, is difficult to manipulate.
I recall watching Adam Curtis' The Century of Self', and thinking, here is a film to assist citizens towards understand how their lives were engineered to this pathway to consumerism, and the concept that 'liberty' was found through it. In the 'comedy' movie, "Thank you for smoking"( 2005 ), audience laughed watching how the 'spin-doctor' for Big Tobacco used Social manipulation, yet, did not understand it was happening to them, every day. This quote from the film became the norm, even before planned obsolescence mandated buying new, forcing those who would not follow. “We must shift America… from a needs to a desired culture. People must be trained to desire new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.”It worked, beyond expectations for Not only did 'products become canvases for identity" but, people willingly wore advertisements for those products, paying for that privilege.
Your quote from President Hoover to PR professionals is powerful, considering the 1928 date of expression. “You have taken over the job of creating desire, and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines—machines which have become the key to economic progress.” While WWII, especially in Europe, tempered that, children born afterwards embraced the new mantra of consumerism. Your use of emboldened text for " a new elite was needed to manage what he called “the bewildered herd” is so vital, for this is precisely what has unfolded, first behind the scenes but now, stated clearly by those elites.Friends who watch contemporary films and tv shows have noted that perspective is insidiously promoted in the US, where the notion of The Republic element in the United States' democratic system, that is, the 'elite class' determines the direction, is underlined to stress the understanding that the 'masses' need to be herded appropriately, by those with wealth and power. If one listens carefully to corporate heads and founders of American corporations, you'll hear this understanding.
The idea that to be happy people must be docile and compliant through seductively enticing means is precisely where we are. Adult Citizens are maintained in infantile life stages, where their base desires are fed, so they will be 'happy" and not suffering. But as the Miller quote states, "we know that possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering."
Bernays and Anna Freud were correct in their premise that beneath the veneer of civility lay dangerous, chaotic drives that can never be fully trusted.But dangerous in what ways and to whom? Dangerous because freely thinking people living in liberty will strive for purpose and meaning, and that can be disruptive to those who want to control their minds? This observation is more strikingly today with cognitive warfare on all fronts of our society, due in part to the recent impact of AI but began years ago with social media, and the algorithmic feeds with endless scrolling enabled.
Your ending question and answer to "whether democracy can survive in a world where the unconscious is endlessly mined, managed, and monetized" needs to move beyond individuals' guarding against manipulation and being vigilance: beyond cultivating media and psychological literacy, and questioning our own desires before we act on them.' As you state, each individual must reclaim their role as citizens with a civic duty. While Roosevelt bet on explanation; Bernays bet on manipulation; and Goebbels bet on frenzy- What are we betting on?
How can we be the ‘geniuses’ to transform our society away from consumption to the values and mindset before the century of self was engineered? Tackling the mined, managed and moetized warfare on multiple fronts requires equally seductive skills for good, for liberty, for purpose and meaning. In addition, while individual effort is necessary, it is essential that committed communities with skills and tenacity form for deliberate engagement on multiple fronts.
Goodness Wendy, this is a terrific comment, thank you. I’m so grateful for the way you have extended the points rather than merely agreeing with them.
You are right about Thank You for Smoking. The unsettling part of that film is not the satire; it’s the recognition. We laugh at the spin-doctor precisely because he is so transparent, yet we rarely apply the same lens to the forces shaping us daily (my side bias). The machinery becomes comic only when we imagine ourselves outside of it.
Your point about people willingly wearing advertisements, paying for the privilege, is one of the most revealing details of the entire century. Identity became portable branding. The self became billboard space. And not through coercion, but through participation.
On the question of the “bewildered herd,” I think you are identifying something essential: what began as a theory of management behind closed doors has, in many quarters, become openly articulated. The language is often softened, “curation,” “engagement,” “optimization”, but the posture remains paternal. The assumption persists that the public must be guided, nudged, shaped. That citizens are volatile unless pacified.
You raise a powerful challenge when you ask: dangerous to whom? The Freudian premise, that beneath civility lie chaotic drives, can be interpreted two ways. Dangerous because unrestrained passion leads to violence. Or dangerous because independent, meaning-seeking individuals disrupt established hierarchies. Both are historically true. The line between them is political. (This reminds me of A Dangerous Method about Jun, Freud and Sabina Spielrein).
And your question, What are we betting on?, is the right one we should be asking. If Roosevelt bet on explanation, Bernays on manipulation, and Goebbels on frenzy, then the bet available to us now may be something quieter but more demanding: capacity. The bet that citizens can become more capable, emotionally disciplined, cognitively resilient, morally serious, without being infantilized.
But I agree with you that this cannot rest on individual vigilance alone. The scale of algorithmic influence, cognitive warfare, and AI-accelerated persuasion exceeds solitary resistance. Communities matter. Institutions matter. Alternative ecosystems of meaning matter.
What might that look like? Not a nostalgic return to a pre-consumer past, that world is gone, but the deliberate construction of parallel structures: media spaces that reward depth over outrage, civic groups that practice deliberation rather than performance, educational systems that treat rhetoric and psychological literacy as core competencies, not electives. In other words, building counter-architecture.
You suggest that we need equally “seductive skills for good.” I would refine that slightly: not seduction in the manipulative sense, but inspiration. Desire will not disappear. The question is what we attach it to. Consumption proved that desire can be engineered. Perhaps purpose can be cultivated as well?
The century of the self trained us to ask, “What do I want?” The next century may hinge on recovering the older question: “What is worth wanting together?”
That is not the work of a lone thinker. It is the work of communities with tenacity, as you say. And perhaps the real test is whether we can make citizenship, not consumption, the more compelling identity again.
Active participation creates understanding beyond mere opinions never vetted. I heard conversations that seemed vacuous and met with city leaders to ask questions. Their appreciation of being able to counter false narratives
has inspired our continuing dialogue. It takes effort to become informed. The complexity of growth and upgrades to aging systems requires allocation of resources the average person does not consider. As a mere citizen, it is a small gesture to do this. The participation has been so mutually rewarding that we look forward to sharing and we have made the effort for almost a year now. I have the deepest respect for these administrators of our growth, safety, and communal events. To be a citizen beyond the ballot box is to understand beyond headlines and talking heads. It gives focus to our direction as a mutual investment.
Thank you Cathie. What you describe is the unglamorous work of citizenship that rarely makes headlines and never trends online. Showing up. Asking questions. Listening to answers that are more complex than slogans. Discovering that what seemed like incompetence or indifference is often a matter of trade-offs, budgets, aging infrastructure, legal constraints, and imperfect information. That kind of engagement does something important: it collapses abstraction.
It is very easy to hold “city leaders” or “administrators” as faceless categories. It is much harder to do so once you’ve sat across from them, heard the constraints they operate under, and allowed them to respond to misunderstandings directly. False narratives lose their oxygen in the presence of dialogue. I so agree with you: participation generates respect. Not blind deference, but informed respect. When you see the complexity of allocating resources or upgrading aging systems, the caricature dissolves. The relationship shifts from spectator and critic to stakeholder and partner.
This is the opposite of the engineered consumer posture. The consumer reacts; the citizen inquires. The consumer demands; the citizen learns the constraints. The consumer is fed narratives; the citizen tests them.
And you are right, it takes effort. The effort is the point.
Democracy beyond the ballot box is not dramatic. It is often procedural, technical, slow. But that slowness is a form of discipline. It resists the reflexive outrage cycle. It builds mutual investment, as you beautifully put it.
If more people practiced what you are describing, sustained, respectful, curious engagement, the space for manipulation would narrow. Not because influence disappears, but because citizens would possess lived understanding that cannot be easily replaced by headlines.
Your year of dialogue is not a “small gesture.” It is the architecture of trust being rebuilt at human scale. And that may be the most practical antidote to a century of engineered appetite: participation that turns opinion into understanding. You gave me a lot to think about.
I like your description, “the relationship shifts from spectator and critic to stakeholder and partner”. Last week I had a one hour meeting of substantive discussion and you have captured precisely our conversational alignment. And your point about “lived understanding” is absolutely the difference between reading the headlines and listening to uninformed criticisms versus going directly to the source of reason. Thank you, Colin.
If more of our civic culture operated at the tempo you describe, an hour, not a headline, the appetite for outrage would lose some of its fuel. The country does not weaken when citizens engage deeply; it strengthens.
And thank you, genuinely, for putting this into practice rather than merely discussing it.
The piece makes a strong case that we’ve drifted from being citizens to being consumers, shaped more by engineered desire than by reflection. The history matters. It shows this did not happen overnight. Psychology, advertising, and politics slowly merged and learned how to pull emotional levers.
What I would add is this: awareness alone is not enough. Knowing we are being influenced does not automatically restore independent thought. We also have built in blind spots like confirmation bias. We naturally look for evidence that supports what we already believe. That makes us easy to steer.
If we want to trust our own minds again, we have to train them. That means slowing down, seeking out views we disagree with, and testing our assumptions against reality. The real work is not just resisting manipulation. It is building habits of clear thinking. A society that can do that is much harder to control.
Thank you Nikolas, you are right to insist that awareness, by itself, is a thin defense.
One of the uncomfortable lessons of the story I tried to tell is precisely that the architects of mass persuasion understood our blind spots better than we do. Bernays did not need people to be ignorant. He needed them to be human. If we are wired for confirmation bias, for belonging, for narrative coherence, then simply exposing the mechanism does not neutralize it. It only gives us a vocabulary for what continues to happen.
I think you are also right that the task is constructive, not merely oppositional. It is not enough to say “do not manipulate me.” One must cultivate the habits that make manipulation less effective. Slowing down. Reading across disagreement. Testing intuitions against evidence rather than applause. These are not dramatic gestures. They are disciplines.
In a sense, this returns us to the fork in the road between Bernays and Roosevelt. One path assumes the public is too impulsive to trust and must therefore be managed. The other assumes that citizens can become more capable if they are treated as such. But that second path is not automatic. It requires effort, education, and practice. It requires what you call training the mind.
The deeper irony is that the very skills that make a society harder to control are the least commercially profitable. Reflection does not scale as easily as desire. Independent thought does not generate quarterly returns. Yet without those habits, democracy becomes theatre.
So I would extend your point this way: the defense against engineered desire is not merely skepticism. It is character. It is the slow cultivation of intellectual virtues that resist the seductions of immediacy. A population that practices that kind of thinking cannot be perfectly insulated from influence, but it can be far less predictable. And unpredictability, in the face of those who would engineer consent, is a form of freedom.
Strong historical arc here. Bernays’ pivot from duty to desire still echoes louder than most people realize. What strikes me now, though, is less the origin of the engineering and more the posture it produces.
At some point the question shifts from “How were we shaped?” to “What do we do with that knowledge?”
The machinery is real. Desire has been cultivated, redirected, monetized. But explanation alone doesn’t restore agency. It can even harden fatalism if we aren’t careful.
The more practical counterweight may not be intellectual resistance but behavioral interruption — reclaiming attention, altering rhythm, refusing reflex. The unconscious can be mined, but it can also be disciplined through posture and timing.
If democracy drifted from duty toward appetite, perhaps the quiet correction begins not in exposing the engineers, but in strengthening the citizen again — one deliberate act at a time.
Appreciate the reminder of the architecture. The next frontier may be the habits that undo it.
Thank you. You are right to move the question forward.
History can clarify origins, but it does not, by itself, repair posture. There is always a risk that explanation becomes a kind of intellectual spectator sport. We diagnose the machinery, admire its precision, and then return to scrolling. That is not agency; it is commentary.
Your phrase “behavioral interruption” is important. The engineering of consent works at the level of rhythm. It thrives on immediacy, on reflex, on the shortening of attention cycles. If that is true, then the counterweight may not begin with a counter-argument but with a counter-tempo. Delayed reaction. Deliberate pause. A refusal to let appetite set the cadence.
In that sense, the restoration of the citizen is less theatrical than we might wish. It happens in small, almost invisible acts: reading something that challenges us rather than confirms us; resisting the urge to perform opinion before forming it; choosing participation over consumption in at least one sphere of life. These are not grand rebellions. They are recalibrations.
So true, Michael, fatalism is a danger. If the unconscious can be shaped, monetized, and mobilized, it is tempting to conclude that we are permanently programmable. But the very fact that posture can change, that rhythm can be altered, suggests otherwise. Discipline is not the denial of desire; it is its governance.
And as Cathie says, the quiet correction you describe is the real frontier. Not a dramatic overthrow of the engineers, but the slow strengthening of habits that make engineering less decisive. If the twentieth century perfected the art of cultivating appetite, the twenty-first may depend on recovering deliberation.
You’re right about tempo.
The machinery works on speed. Reflex. Appetite. Shortened cycles.
Which means the interruption has to be behavioral, not just intellectual.
Slowing reaction. Finishing thought before broadcasting it. Choosing to read before responding. Small disciplines that don’t look dramatic but change cadence over time.
Engineering thrives on predictability. Agency reappears the moment rhythm is no longer automatic.
The correction won’t be loud. It will be steady.
And steady, practiced long enough, reshapes posture.
I like your positive reframing of strengthening the citizens again, rather than focusing on the engineering of the shift.
As Colin has written about cognitive warfare, this quiet correction, as you state, could begin on this necessary front.
Hum, what could be some deliberate acts that would strengthen citizens again?
"Ultimately it means actively working to create the person you want to be..." This implies the first step is answering the question "Who do I want to be?" followed by "why?". It's seemingly simple and straightforward, but in reality it isn't.
I concur, Winston, it is seemingly straightforward but in reality it isn't.
I'd like to add that, as a mentor, I've come to reframe this question in a different way, as the 'self-help' movement is a billion dollar industry promoting this, "Who do I want to be" question into self absorption, ego driven answers, that do not have the desired outcome you'd and I'd hoped for from what is meant as a self-reflection question on life to this moment in their lives.
Here is what i ask my mentees: What overarching outcome is desirable, and why, not only for self but for society. This question, I've found, focuses their mind in a significant arc of thoughtful investigation.
Winston, I think you have put your finger on a key point. The moment you actually try to answer “Who do I want to be?” the ground shifts. Is that answer emerging from reflection, or from a catalogue of prepackaged identities handed to me by culture, advertising, tribe?
That is precisely where my essay’s history becomes relevant. If desire has been cultivated for a century, then even our self-image may not be entirely our own. The question is simple in grammar and complex in origin.
Wendy, your reframing is deeply compelling. The self-help industry has indeed taken that question and turned it inward to the point of distortion. “Who do I want to be?” too easily becomes “How do I optimize my status, comfort, visibility?” It can harden into ego maintenance.
Your alternative, “What overarching outcome is desirable, and why, not only for self but for society?”, shifts the axis perfectly. It reintroduces duty without denying individuality. It places the self back inside a larger field of consequence. That move alone disrupts the consumer logic that tells us identity is something we purchase and curate.
There is something profoundly anti-Bernays in that reframing. It resists engineered appetite and asks instead about contribution, responsibility, orientation. It treats the self not as a project of aesthetic construction, but as a participant in a shared world.
Perhaps the real answer to Winston’s question is that the “who” cannot be settled before the “why,” and the “why” cannot be answered in isolation. The person we want to become is inseparable from the kind of society we are willing to help build. And that is a much harder, and more fruitful, inquiry than the self-help aisle suggests.
Bernays has a lot to answer for.
You’re asking the right question.
Strengthening citizens doesn’t begin with slogans or counter-propaganda. It begins with small disciplines that return weight to the individual.
A few deliberate acts come to mind:
First — pause before reacting. Not silence. Not withdrawal. Just a deliberate delay between stimulus and response. That one space restores agency.
Second — read something longer than you prefer. A chapter, not a headline. Attention is a muscle. If we don’t exercise it, someone else will gladly train it for us.
Third — speak in complete thoughts. Not fragments. Not reposted lines. When you articulate your own reasoning out loud, you reclaim authorship of your mind.
Fourth — verify one thing a week yourself. Go to the primary source. Look at the document. Don’t rely on the summary. That habit alone changes posture.
Fifth — build something tangible. Fix a hinge. Plant something. Cook without a shortcut. When the hands work, the mind steadies.
None of these are dramatic. That’s the point.
Strength doesn’t return through spectacle. It returns through repetition.
Quiet correction doesn’t look like rebellion. It looks like competence.
And competence, multiplied across households, is difficult to manipulate.
I recall watching Adam Curtis' The Century of Self', and thinking, here is a film to assist citizens towards understand how their lives were engineered to this pathway to consumerism, and the concept that 'liberty' was found through it. In the 'comedy' movie, "Thank you for smoking"( 2005 ), audience laughed watching how the 'spin-doctor' for Big Tobacco used Social manipulation, yet, did not understand it was happening to them, every day. This quote from the film became the norm, even before planned obsolescence mandated buying new, forcing those who would not follow. “We must shift America… from a needs to a desired culture. People must be trained to desire new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.”It worked, beyond expectations for Not only did 'products become canvases for identity" but, people willingly wore advertisements for those products, paying for that privilege.
Your quote from President Hoover to PR professionals is powerful, considering the 1928 date of expression. “You have taken over the job of creating desire, and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines—machines which have become the key to economic progress.” While WWII, especially in Europe, tempered that, children born afterwards embraced the new mantra of consumerism. Your use of emboldened text for " a new elite was needed to manage what he called “the bewildered herd” is so vital, for this is precisely what has unfolded, first behind the scenes but now, stated clearly by those elites.Friends who watch contemporary films and tv shows have noted that perspective is insidiously promoted in the US, where the notion of The Republic element in the United States' democratic system, that is, the 'elite class' determines the direction, is underlined to stress the understanding that the 'masses' need to be herded appropriately, by those with wealth and power. If one listens carefully to corporate heads and founders of American corporations, you'll hear this understanding.
The idea that to be happy people must be docile and compliant through seductively enticing means is precisely where we are. Adult Citizens are maintained in infantile life stages, where their base desires are fed, so they will be 'happy" and not suffering. But as the Miller quote states, "we know that possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering."
Bernays and Anna Freud were correct in their premise that beneath the veneer of civility lay dangerous, chaotic drives that can never be fully trusted.But dangerous in what ways and to whom? Dangerous because freely thinking people living in liberty will strive for purpose and meaning, and that can be disruptive to those who want to control their minds? This observation is more strikingly today with cognitive warfare on all fronts of our society, due in part to the recent impact of AI but began years ago with social media, and the algorithmic feeds with endless scrolling enabled.
Your ending question and answer to "whether democracy can survive in a world where the unconscious is endlessly mined, managed, and monetized" needs to move beyond individuals' guarding against manipulation and being vigilance: beyond cultivating media and psychological literacy, and questioning our own desires before we act on them.' As you state, each individual must reclaim their role as citizens with a civic duty. While Roosevelt bet on explanation; Bernays bet on manipulation; and Goebbels bet on frenzy- What are we betting on?
How can we be the ‘geniuses’ to transform our society away from consumption to the values and mindset before the century of self was engineered? Tackling the mined, managed and moetized warfare on multiple fronts requires equally seductive skills for good, for liberty, for purpose and meaning. In addition, while individual effort is necessary, it is essential that committed communities with skills and tenacity form for deliberate engagement on multiple fronts.
Goodness Wendy, this is a terrific comment, thank you. I’m so grateful for the way you have extended the points rather than merely agreeing with them.
You are right about Thank You for Smoking. The unsettling part of that film is not the satire; it’s the recognition. We laugh at the spin-doctor precisely because he is so transparent, yet we rarely apply the same lens to the forces shaping us daily (my side bias). The machinery becomes comic only when we imagine ourselves outside of it.
Your point about people willingly wearing advertisements, paying for the privilege, is one of the most revealing details of the entire century. Identity became portable branding. The self became billboard space. And not through coercion, but through participation.
On the question of the “bewildered herd,” I think you are identifying something essential: what began as a theory of management behind closed doors has, in many quarters, become openly articulated. The language is often softened, “curation,” “engagement,” “optimization”, but the posture remains paternal. The assumption persists that the public must be guided, nudged, shaped. That citizens are volatile unless pacified.
You raise a powerful challenge when you ask: dangerous to whom? The Freudian premise, that beneath civility lie chaotic drives, can be interpreted two ways. Dangerous because unrestrained passion leads to violence. Or dangerous because independent, meaning-seeking individuals disrupt established hierarchies. Both are historically true. The line between them is political. (This reminds me of A Dangerous Method about Jun, Freud and Sabina Spielrein).
And your question, What are we betting on?, is the right one we should be asking. If Roosevelt bet on explanation, Bernays on manipulation, and Goebbels on frenzy, then the bet available to us now may be something quieter but more demanding: capacity. The bet that citizens can become more capable, emotionally disciplined, cognitively resilient, morally serious, without being infantilized.
But I agree with you that this cannot rest on individual vigilance alone. The scale of algorithmic influence, cognitive warfare, and AI-accelerated persuasion exceeds solitary resistance. Communities matter. Institutions matter. Alternative ecosystems of meaning matter.
What might that look like? Not a nostalgic return to a pre-consumer past, that world is gone, but the deliberate construction of parallel structures: media spaces that reward depth over outrage, civic groups that practice deliberation rather than performance, educational systems that treat rhetoric and psychological literacy as core competencies, not electives. In other words, building counter-architecture.
You suggest that we need equally “seductive skills for good.” I would refine that slightly: not seduction in the manipulative sense, but inspiration. Desire will not disappear. The question is what we attach it to. Consumption proved that desire can be engineered. Perhaps purpose can be cultivated as well?
The century of the self trained us to ask, “What do I want?” The next century may hinge on recovering the older question: “What is worth wanting together?”
That is not the work of a lone thinker. It is the work of communities with tenacity, as you say. And perhaps the real test is whether we can make citizenship, not consumption, the more compelling identity again.
Active participation creates understanding beyond mere opinions never vetted. I heard conversations that seemed vacuous and met with city leaders to ask questions. Their appreciation of being able to counter false narratives
has inspired our continuing dialogue. It takes effort to become informed. The complexity of growth and upgrades to aging systems requires allocation of resources the average person does not consider. As a mere citizen, it is a small gesture to do this. The participation has been so mutually rewarding that we look forward to sharing and we have made the effort for almost a year now. I have the deepest respect for these administrators of our growth, safety, and communal events. To be a citizen beyond the ballot box is to understand beyond headlines and talking heads. It gives focus to our direction as a mutual investment.
Thank you Cathie. What you describe is the unglamorous work of citizenship that rarely makes headlines and never trends online. Showing up. Asking questions. Listening to answers that are more complex than slogans. Discovering that what seemed like incompetence or indifference is often a matter of trade-offs, budgets, aging infrastructure, legal constraints, and imperfect information. That kind of engagement does something important: it collapses abstraction.
It is very easy to hold “city leaders” or “administrators” as faceless categories. It is much harder to do so once you’ve sat across from them, heard the constraints they operate under, and allowed them to respond to misunderstandings directly. False narratives lose their oxygen in the presence of dialogue. I so agree with you: participation generates respect. Not blind deference, but informed respect. When you see the complexity of allocating resources or upgrading aging systems, the caricature dissolves. The relationship shifts from spectator and critic to stakeholder and partner.
This is the opposite of the engineered consumer posture. The consumer reacts; the citizen inquires. The consumer demands; the citizen learns the constraints. The consumer is fed narratives; the citizen tests them.
And you are right, it takes effort. The effort is the point.
Democracy beyond the ballot box is not dramatic. It is often procedural, technical, slow. But that slowness is a form of discipline. It resists the reflexive outrage cycle. It builds mutual investment, as you beautifully put it.
If more people practiced what you are describing, sustained, respectful, curious engagement, the space for manipulation would narrow. Not because influence disappears, but because citizens would possess lived understanding that cannot be easily replaced by headlines.
Your year of dialogue is not a “small gesture.” It is the architecture of trust being rebuilt at human scale. And that may be the most practical antidote to a century of engineered appetite: participation that turns opinion into understanding. You gave me a lot to think about.
I like your description, “the relationship shifts from spectator and critic to stakeholder and partner”. Last week I had a one hour meeting of substantive discussion and you have captured precisely our conversational alignment. And your point about “lived understanding” is absolutely the difference between reading the headlines and listening to uninformed criticisms versus going directly to the source of reason. Thank you, Colin.
If more of our civic culture operated at the tempo you describe, an hour, not a headline, the appetite for outrage would lose some of its fuel. The country does not weaken when citizens engage deeply; it strengthens.
And thank you, genuinely, for putting this into practice rather than merely discussing it.